Guest essay by Andi Cockroft
I wish I had read Anthony’s excellent article “Thinking of buying a weather station for Christmas? Read this first.” published late last year. Then again, I bought my cheap Chinese weather station a good 6 months before it was published so I was kind of fishing around in the dark on my own.
My home is completely off-grid, but I do have the comforts of home including (albeit slow) Internet via 3G. Netflix and Satellite TV provide the evening’s entertainment when it’s just too wet and wild to be outdoors.
Power is solar with gasoline back-up, so a 12v supply is pretty plentiful. In addition I run my 5v devices through a 20 amp Buck converter so all my handy little modern appliances are kept fully charged.
Anyhow, at an elevation of 400 metres (1300’) above sea level on a cliff looking south over New Zealand’s Cook Strait, I do get battered pretty frequently by strong southerly winds blowing directly from the Antarctic. These are regularly reported in the media as being over 160Kph (100Mph). But are they really?
So, being curious about such things, I looked around and found a reasonably priced (I thought) unit that seemed to offer everything I needed. It measured rain, wind (speed and direction), humidity and both internal and external temperatures. An outdoor unit was solar powered, with an indoor base powered by either batteries or 5v micro USB. The USB also allowed data to be downloaded to a PC. Seemed ideal – at the time.
First things first – assemble and install:-
Southerlies Regularly Hit Here at 160Kph
The indoor unit shows things in detail:-
As can be seen, this is branded DIGITECH in New Zealand
Branded as DIGITECH in New Zealand, it turns out that this is actually a “Fine Offset WH1080”. Made in China, but at least carrying a warranty from a reputable high-street supplier.
….and it came bundled with software called “EasyWeather” – which seemed to work reasonably well but it did have its drawbacks as I will describe later.
On a nice calm day, the view from my door across the Cook Strait to New Zealand’s South Island is truly magnificent. However, given the winds that can arrive here, the WH1080 just wasn’t up to the job.
In total, I have had 2 units replaced under warranty due to wind breakages and 2 units replaced due to failure of the unit itself. Couple that to failure of the included alkaline rechargeable batteries in the outdoor unit, and boy am I glad I bought from a high-street supplier who honoured their warranty rather than import directly from China myself.
The view from my door across the Cook Strait
The final solution just to make it survive, was to dispense with a rather fragile plastic arm that kept breaking and glue the main unit onto the support pole. To date it has survived several storms with winds well up to 100mph and came out unscathed.
Glue the main unit onto the support pole
Downsides to all this, as Anthony’s article would have told me had I read it before embarking on this adventure in technology would have cautioned my against these cheap Chinese units. But heh, I’ve come so far already so not time yet to abandon the project!
But I did mention downsides:-
Number one for me was sheer power consumption. For most this isn’t going to be a real issue, but for me living off-grid and relying on solar panels, running a PC 24×7 is just not on. I needed a better way.
Two, the rain gauge is far from accurate. Last week apparently I had 5½ metres of rain overnight!!!! A slight exaggeration it seems.
But the other gauges seem reasonable. Temperatures, wind and direction agree reasonably closely with regional expectations. Not sure about humidity and dew point but not something I’m geared up to measure any other way.
Once the bug actually bites, a quick search reveals all sorts of places that weather enthusiasts come together to share their data and help contribute towards a global set of amateur weather stations. The bundled EasyWeather software already had support built in for WeatherUnderground, WeatherBug and WeatherCloud. And this is where I started.
Opening an account at WeatherUnderground couldn’t be easier, and mine is now registered as IWELLING358 found at https://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=IWELLING358
As I said earlier though, running a PC 24×7 is just not an option for me, so I was only able to update WeatherUnderground in the morning and evening when my PC is turned on. The rest of the day it lies idle just to save on power so the data at WeatherUnderground was stale most of the time.
So bearing in mind I have 12v and 5v readily available, I decided to take the bull by the horns and dig out an old Raspberry Pi that hadn’t been used for years. A quick rub down, reinstall the Linux operating system and then look to an application that would provide the functionality of EasyWeather for uploading to WeatherUnderground. My search honed in quite quickly on WVIEW as being the most popular (or so it seemed). WVIEW webpage is at http://www.wviewweather.com/
Regrettably I wasted a week or so of my time trying to get WVIEW up and running, but maybe my skillset, maybe the Raspberry Pi or just simple gremlins, nothing I did could kick it into life. So more research and WEEWX looked promising. And I have to report that it installed first time simply following the very straight-forward instructions from the website. Find WEEWX at http://weewx.com/
The nice thing about WEEWX is that not only does it upload to many weather services in addition to WeatherUnderground, it also generates a website that can be viewed via Apache, Nginx etc.
Unfortunately I don’t have an external IP with my 3G internet service, so cannot directly access the web interface remotely. However, I do have access to a remote web server and every 5 minutes as the data is updated at WeatherUnderground, a script also FTP’s the whole WEEWX website across to a public web server. This is at http://weather.andic.co.nz – note the timestamp is in Pacific/Auckland time.
As time permits, I might get around to changing things, but the standard WEEWX layout is pretty comprehensive – at least for now.
One day I might progress to bigger and better things, and certainly heed Anthony’s warnings, but for now things are stable – if it ain’t busted, don’t fix it !
Should you decide to head in this direction and set up your own personal weather station, don’t do as I did – read Anthony’s article first!
Full disclosure: Andi Cockroft is one of our WUWT volunteer moderators living in New Zealand
A simple way to test the accuracy of your humidity/dew-point would be using a “wet-bulb/dry-bulb” measurement and a psychrometric chart.
I started with a Davis Vantage Vue and now have a wireless VP2 Plus with 24 hour fan aspirated radiation shield. In case some don’t know, this particular station also has UV and solar sensors besides the normal weather sensors that every other weather station has.
I never had an issue with my Vue which ran from 2008 until last year when i upgraded to the VP2+, and it was still working when I took it down. I have a YouTube video that’s had about 15k views of my Vue’s anemometer spinning with several inches of snow on top. https://youtu.be/LlmKUceel_8
I highly discourage cheap weather stations, they just aren’t accurate or reliable enough to properly do the job. If I had to recommend a starter station I would do the Vantage Vue again.
The software that you use on the station console end is extremely important. You have three communication options with a Davis station console, and they all involve a device called a data-logger. While it does store data for a while, the main purpose is to take the data from the console and send it so that it can be processed. So one end of this data-logger plugs into the console, and the other into a computer or ethernet cable. The two loggers for the computer are serial or USB, the other logger is an IP logger. The IP logger sends data directly to Davis where you have a little webpage to view it. I don’t recommend this method for several reasons.
The computer that my Vue was originally attached to was an old Dell tower that had a serial port, while the new VP2+ uses an USB connection.
Even if you don’t want to build a website, the software on the computer makes all the difference. No one really uses the bundled software the comes with the data-loggers (Weatherlink), but instead go with one of several others:
Weather-Display – The most complex, and a clunky interface, but it supports more stations and more everything. Take a look at these two links,
one is my website: http://www.daculaweather.com/
and the other is a text file that gets uploaded every 5 seconds or so: http://www.daculaweather.com/testtags.php?sce=view
The data you see on the website comes from this text file (also called testtags.php). This file is constantly being updated by the software and uploaded to the website where an AJAX script running on the page periodically re-reads the data and refreshes automatically without having to refresh the page. This feature is not unique to WD as there are other software packages (Virtual Weather Station or VWS, Cumulus, and the aforementioned Weatherlink that can also generate a file to upload for other versions of the AJAX script to process.
There is a lot to talk about and lots of ways of doing this… I highly recommend two resources:
Before you buy a station, go to http://www.wxforum.net/ There you will find the most knowledge about personal weather stations, software, scripts, and on and on. It’s a REALLY great resource.
The other site is the personal site of the guy that runs WXForum. Here you’ll find templates, scripts etc. This also where the AJAX scripts are located, and all of this is free.
http://saratoga-weather.org/index.php
If you’re just getting started and think you would like to have a weather website to display your data, Ken’s templates are the most well thought out and comprehensive you’ll find. I have another site that I send my data to in addition to my DaculaWeather.com site, and it uses the template if you’d like to see it.
http://gwinnettweather.com/
I’m also installing weather stations at two schools and they will both use the template for their website. Neither one has live weather station data right now but the other sections are all functional. These two stations also have 4 soil moisture and temperature sensors buried in the ground, and that is also a Davis setup and the other nice thing about the Davis equipment, with the higher end stations you can add all types of things to them.
http://daculaweather.com/Partee/index.php
http://daculaweather.com/Centerville/index.php
Davis Instruments 6357 Vantage Vue Wireless Integrated Sensor Suite + Raspberry PI Zero + RTL SDR + 5″ HDMI display = $200 24/7 IP based very low wattage weather station
I use Intel NUC’s for my weather computers. They each pull about 6-10 watts. More details about them here: http://blog.northgeorgiawx.com/weather-blog/weather-computers
I have a story from my distant past which relates to Andi’s general location. Around about 1959 Wellington’s airport at Rongotai was completely rebuilt. The works included a radar installation at the top of the nearby Hawkins Hill. If I remember correctly the specification included the ability to operate in winds up to 100mph and to be able to withstand gusts to 140mph. The later suspicion is that the successful tenderer took this part of the specification with a considerable grain of salt.
Once the radar was installed, it wasn’t long before the rotating antennae started to give trouble. Structural members in antennae frame started to crack and the gears in the driving mechanism were wearing at an unexpectedly high rate. After several bouts of repairs and rebuilds in the first year, the manufacturer eventually sent out a representative to find out what was going on. He wanted to see the antennae in operation and it so happened that on that day it was blowing a good southerly gale. The locals cautioned him about going up to the antennae in that weather but, the representative was adamant, that day would be ideal to see the antennae operating in severe conditions. So they drove him up Hawkins Hill.
Near the top the driver stopped and parked in the shelter of an embankment in the hill side where although the car was sheltered it was rocking and swaying in the wind. “I’m not going any further” he said. The representative unlatched the door of the car to get out. It was immediately snatched out of his hands by the wind and half ripped off the side of the car. This gave the representative cause for thought but he had gone too far to turn back. He got out of the car and struggled towards the corner of the embankment. After only a few steps he was reduced to crawling on his hands and knees. He got to the end of the embankment and peered around to see the antennae about 80 metres away. That was as close as he got.
Some months later the airport installed a completely new and beefed up antennae.
I had a similar, if not identical, unit as yours until the inside display failed.
We had a small earth tremor here in South Australia a few years ago while my system was working and it recorded over 60 inches of rain.
Not the most reliable of systems and with yours being installed in the ‘shaky isles’ you may record a lot of rain that does not actually exist.
Hi Patrick. If you read the article you’ll see I am using a Pi nowadays – that’s why I’m also running WEEWX.
Cheers
Andi
PS yes still Land Rovers!
Yeah, I read your article after posting and had a “D’oh!” moment. Looking forward to your off-grid post.
I’ve been running two weather stations based on Campbell Scientific gear for several years now. One thing about the pro gear, it is bulletproof. One station at Havre, MT survived a brutal microburst with wind speeds over 100MPH even though the winds literally ripped the roofs off nearby buildings. However we did lose connectivity since the power went down for several days. We lost a couple of days of data because the battery ran down and it was cloudy enough so that the solar cell wasn’t able to keep it charged (normally the station is powered from AC supplied from the grid). Once power came back up everything worked.
The other station is just south of town here and runs “off the grid”. Lots of problems with that here in the winter due to extremely cold temperatures and long periods of cloudiness. If you live in LA, you could probably get away with it. Not in Montana. One thing I have found is that the rain gauge on the second station gives incorrect readings after being in icy conditions. The rain gauge on the first station is a self-heated model which always gives sensible readings.
I have not had the “pleasure”” of a Montana assignment, but I did notice that there were two complete aisles of “weather-indoor/outdoor-thermometers-rain gauges and remote car starters in EVERY little hardware store in EVERY little town outside Bismark ND last May.
So, for a much more pleasant middle-south Appalachian-Piedmont climate, what is the recommended outside station?
Again, I highly recommend any of the Davis stations for your area. I’m in a suburb just NE of Atlanta and our weather (even in the mountains) is not an issue for the Davis equipment. Again, if you want to share your data or upload it to your own website, be careful about which one you pick, not all have that capability.
Here’s my VP2+ https://photos.app.goo.gl/oqe1I2F3cjUrhgdl1
Thank you for the courtesy of your reply, your recommendation.
Also.. the siting of the station is one of the most important if not the most important part of accurate weather measurements. Here’s a great resource that details that
https://www.weather.gov/media/epz/mesonet/CWOP-Siting.pdf
Another nice feature of the higher end Davis stations is that the anemometer can be detached from the station so it can be mounted at a height closer to ideal, and that can be done wired or wireless. When I move in a year or two, my new location will have the anemometer at 10 meters while the rest of the station sits at 5 feet.
I’ve bought three Davis #6163 stations from these people and their prices seem to be as good as anyone’s.
https://www.scientificsales.com/
I have also purchased the #6332 wireless anemometer for the 2 school stations as well as the #6345CS soil temp and moisture station that includes 4 temp and 4 moisture sensors.
Now that was funny! WRT the WH1080 plus the WEEWX thing did it come COD, FEDEX, UPS, USPS, or DHS?
ROTFLMAO!
Now that was funny! WRT the WH1080 plus the WEEWX thing did it come COD, FEDEX, UPS, USPS, or DHS?
ROTFLMAO!
http://highcliffareaweather.com/ – davis vantage pro2 I’ve had since 2005 I think. Just updated it with a php weather34 web page with the help of a friend.
Anyone know of a good radar page that can be combined with google map let me know. WU radar is not to exciting. http://highcliffareaweather.com/
I had a Vantage, not sure Vue or Pro, when I lived in Seattle, and liked it. I have moved to the countryside on the east side of the Cascades, where the climate is somewhat harsher. I’m going to get a VP2, and the various testimonials lead me to think climate where I am won’t be a problem at all.
But I have a couple of simple stupid questions that I hope anyone can answer. My house has a steel roof. I plan to mount the unit up there, about 30 feet or so off the ground on a mounting pole attached to the chimney and protruding a couple feet above it.
1. The house has a steel roof. Will this interfere with the wireless transmissions?
2. Are there any advantages to a cabled unit?
3. Just to be sure, is the integrated collector unit solar powered? Am I going to need to climb way up there at any point?
4. Is there any advantage to paying the extra money to be able to mount the anemometer separately from the main unit?
Thanks very much in advance. Anthony, I will purchase this through your company.
Something occurred to me with respect to my question #4.
If I mounted the main unit much lower, for accessibility’s sake, with the anemometer way up high, I’d eliminate any potential problems from heat coming out of the chimney or bouncing off the metal roof in summer, while preserving the height advantage of putting the anemometer up high.
Any thoughts?
Do your best to not mount the temperature sensor near the roof. You will end up with artificially high readings, especially when the sun is shining. Being able to detach the anemometer is a big plus and allows you to keep the temp/rain/humidity sensor where it needs to be..
I would go wireless. I don’t like having a cable running into my house from outside if I can help it.
And yes, the integrated senor suite is solar powered. Also, if you get the wireless anemometer kit, it has its own solar panel as well.
“NorthGeorgiaWX February 8, 2018 at 7:52 pm
Do your best to not mount the temperature sensor near the roof. ”
That’s how the pros do it!
Thanks for the discussion. I have 20 acres, so no lack of room for placement. Today I ordered all the stuff (VP2 with 24-hr radiation fan + separate wireless anemometer unit). I will mount the main unit on a tripod about 150 feet from the house, and will put the anemometer on a pole strapped to the chimney and extending upward from it. The data will go onto the Internet. I’m in an optimal spot up here at 1,800 feet.
Very awesome! You’re going to love it! Let me know if you have any questions! 🙂
LOL! I was just telling my wife that many PWS owners have better sited stations than some of the “official” stations.
For accurate data I can’t overemphasize the importance of location. Most people send their data to CWOP and it goes through a quality control check to make sure that what you send is valid data. I would think that anyone with a weather station, and most certainly anyone here, understands the importance of “good” data.
I also understand that everyone has limitations about where to install a station, and in those cases you just have to do the best you can, but just know that from and CWOP and MADIS point of view, it may not pass their checks.
Here’s a way to retrieve the data directly from your wireless weather sensor’s using a RTL-SDR.
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/reverse-engineering-weather-station-rf-signals-with-an-rtl-sdr/
I’ve never tired this myself so I can’t say if it will work with a personal weather station that’s different from the author’s.
I’ll look into it to see if it will work with my Oregon Scientific WMR968.
I have fine offset. Its OK. I had to move the rain gauge down the pole as it shakes and you have get phantom rain readings.
Weewx is good. I wish it could change the reporting time from midnight to 9 a.m just like here in Oz.
My station is here. http://weather.ubeaut.work/ it is on weather underground and WOW met office in UK as well.
I have written a script to fix up the wrong rain readings as it happens every so often. The script resets the wrong data in the data base. I use mysql and not sqlite.